The present invention relates to a memory controller component for Internet Applications and an ATM including such a memory controller component.
There is a requirement for Internet Banking and Financial Services Applications, to keep information (such as account details, PIN numbers etc.) available and secure when a user swaps between web pages. The user may swap pages within a site, for example, when conducting on-line banking and swapping from one account transaction to another; or when a user swaps between pages on different sites such as from their bank""s web site to a utility, supermarket or airline web site. It is important, if such inter- or intra-site commerce is to be conducted, for data relating to the user to be persistent between web pages, because requesting the user to enter a card number or PIN multiple times is not viable from a usability viewpoint.
A xe2x80x98cookiexe2x80x99 mechanism, well known in the prior art, attempts to overcome this problem. This mechanism, however, is both unwieldy and not guaranteed to be successful as the acceptance of cookies is a browser determined function.
Accordingly, in a first aspect the present invention provides a memory controller component for an Internet application, comprising one or more web pages, said component being adapted to be instantiated from one of the or each web page and comprising: connect means adapted to check if a pre-determined area of shared memory has been allocated, and responsive to said shared 10 memory not being allocated to allocate said shared memory; variable setting means adapted to allocate an area in shared memory for a variable and to store said variable; and variable retrieval means adapted to locate said variable in shared memory.
In the further aspect the invention provides an ATM including the memory controller component according to the first aspect of the invention.
The first aspect of the invention preferably provides a ACTIVEX or JAVABEAN memory controller component that can be attached to a web page written using the JAVASCRIPT or VBSCRIPT extensions to HTML (hyper-text mark-up language), or the JAVA language, to store and retrieve variable data, in either secure (encrypted) or insecure (clear) modes. Other web pages, that can reside on other servers, can also access this data via their. own instance of the memory controller component, providing an easy to use and secure method of transferring sensitive data between pages.